9/11: State Crimes Against Democracy, Hidden In Plain Sight

by David Ray Griffin

At 5:21 PM on 9/11, Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed, even
though it had not been hit by a plane - a fact that is important because of
the widespread acceptance of the idea, in spite of its scientific absurdity,
that the Twin Towers collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact
of the airliners plus the ensuing jet-fuel-fed fires. The collapse of World
Trade Center 7 (WTC 7) thereby challenges the official account of the
destruction of the World Trade Center, according to which it was
accomplished by al-Qaeda hijackers, even if one accepts the government's
scientifically impossible account of the Twin Towers. This fact was recently
emphasized in the title of a review article based on my 2009 book, The
Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7,[1] by National Medal of
Science-winner Lynn Margulis: "Two Hit, Three Down - The Biggest Lie."[2]

1. Why the Collapse of WTC 7 Created an Extraordinary Problem

The collapse of WTC 7 created an extraordinary problem for the official
account of 9/11 for several reasons.

An Unprecedented Occurrence

One reason is that, because of the collapse of WTC 7, the official account
of 9/11 includes the dubious claim that, for the first time in the known
universe, a steel-frame high-rise building was brought down by fire, and
science looks askance at claims of unprecedented occurrences regarding
physical phenomena. New York Times writer James Glanz, who himself has a
Ph.D. in physics, wrote: "[E]xperts said no building like it, a modern,
steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled
fire." Glanz then quoted a structural engineer as saying: "[W]ithin the
structural engineering community, [WTC 7] is considered to be much more
important to understand [than the Twin Towers]," because engineers had no
answer to the question, "why did 7 come down?"[3]

Visual Evidence of Implosion

Equally remarkable, besides the mere fact that this building came down, was
the way it collapsed: straight down, in virtual free fall, making the
destruction of this building appear to be an example of the type of
controlled demolition known as "implosion," in which explosives and/or
incendiaries are used to slice the building's steel support columns in such
a way as to cause the building to collapse into its own footprint. CBS
anchor Dan Rather, not one to let a remarkable fact go unremarked, said:

"[I]t's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen . . . on television . .
. , where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to
knock it down."[4]

Dan Rather, moreover, was not the only reporter to make such a comment. Al
Jones, a reporter for WINS NYC News Radio, said: "I turned in time to see
what looked like a skyscraper implosion - looked like it had been done by a
demolition crew."[5]

Moreover, whereas Jones and Rather, being laymen in these matters, merely
said that the collapse of Building 7 looked like a controlled demolition,
experts, upon seeing the video, could tell immediately that it actually was
a controlled demolition.

In 2006, for example, a Dutch filmmaker asked Danny Jowenko, the owner of a
controlled demolition company in the Netherlands, to comment on a video of
the collapse of WTC 7, without telling him what it was. (Jowenko had been
unaware that a third building had collapsed on 9/11.) After viewing the
video, Jowenko said: "They simply blew up columns, and the rest caved in
afterwards. . . . This is controlled demolition." When asked if he was
certain, he replied: "Absolutely, it's been imploded. This was a hired job.
A team of experts did this."[6]

Testimonies about Explosions

Besides the obviousness from the very appearance of the collapse of Building
7 that it was a product of controlled demotion, there were testimonies about
explosions in this building.

One of these was provided by Michael Hess, New York City's corporation
counsel and a close friend of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. While on his way back to
City Hall, Hess was stopped for an interview at 11:57 that morning, during
which he said:

"I was up in the emergency management center on the twenty-third floor [of
WTC 7], and when all the power went out in the building, another gentleman
and I walked down to the eighth floor [sic] where there was an explosion and
we were trapped on the eighth floor with smoke, thick smoke, all around us,
for about an hour and a half. But the New York Fire Department . . . just
came and got us out."[7]

Hess thereby reported a mid-morning explosion in WTC 7.

The other gentleman, Barry Jennings of the New York City Housing Authority,
reported the same thing during another on-the-street interview, reporting
that he and "Mr. Hess" had been walking down the stairs when they became
trapped by a "big explosion."[8] Jennings, in fact, said that explosions
continued going off while they were waiting to be rescued.[9]

There were also reports of explosions in the late afternoon, just as WTC 7
started coming down. Reporter Peter Demarco of the New York Daily News said:

"[T]here was a rumble. The building's top row of windows popped out. Then
all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth
floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a
rising cloud of gray."[10]

NYPD officer Craig Bartmer gave the following report:

"I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down. . . . That didn't sound
like just a building falling down to me . . . . There's a lot of eyewitness
testimony down there of hearing explosions. . . . [A]ll of a sudden. . . I
looked up, and . . . [t]he thing started pealing in on itself. . . . I
started running . . . and the whole time you're hearing 'boom, boom, boom,
boom, boom.'"[11]

A New York University medical student, who had been serving as an emergency
medical worker that day, gave this report:

"[W]e heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder. . . . [T]urned
around - we were shocked. . . . [I]t looked like there was a shockwave
ripping through the building and the windows all busted out. . . . [A]bout a
second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after
that."[12]

Physical Evidence

In addition to the visual and testimonial evidence, there was clear physical
evidence that explosives and incendiaries were used to bring down WTC 7.

Swiss-Cheese Steel: Within a few months of 9/11, three professors from
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) had issued a report about a piece of
steel from Building 7 that was described in a New York Times story by James
Glanz and Eric Lipton as "[p]erhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the
investigation."13 Part of the mystery was the fact that the steel was
"extremely thin," indicating that the steel had "melted away," even though
"no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel
outright." Another part of the mystery was that atoms in the steel seemed to
have combined with sulfur "to form compounds that melt at lower
temperatures," but as to the source of the sulfur, "no one knows."[14]

Describing this mysterious piece of steel more fully, an article entitled
"The 'Deep Mystery' of Melted Steel" in WPI's magazine, said:

"[S]teel - which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit - may
weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire. Yet
metallurgical studies . . . reveal that . . . a eutectic reaction . . .
caus[ed] intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into
Swiss cheese . . .. A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch
thickness. Its edges - which are curled like a paper scroll - have been
thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes - some larger than a silver
dollar - let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss
cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to
see distortion and bending - but not holes. A eutectic compound is a mixture
[involving sulfur]. . . . 'The important questions," says [one of the
professors], 'are how much sulfur do you need, and where did it come
from?'"[15]

The thinning and the holes even suggested that the steel had vaporized.
Explaining as early as November 2001 why fire could not account for this
mysterious steel, Glanz paraphrased one of the three WPI professors,
Jonathan Barnett, as saying that it "appear[ed] to have been partly
evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures."[16]

Another New York Times story reported that the same phenomenon was described
by Professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl of the University of California at
Berkeley, who had received a National Science Foundation grant to spend two
weeks at Ground Zero studying steel from the buildings. According to
reporter Kenneth Change, Professor Astaneh-Asl, speaking of a horizontal
I-beam from WTC 7, said: "Parts of the flat top of the I, once five-eighths
of an inch thick, had vaporized."[17]

These reports clearly showed that something other than fire had been making
things happen in the buildings, because the fires could not possibly have
been higher than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, while the boiling point of steel
is roughly the same as that of iron, which is 5182°F. But even if the steel
had not evaporated but had simply melted, that by itself would have proved
the point, because the melting point of steel is only a little less than
that of iron, which is 2800°F. (An obvious source of both the melting and
the sulfidation would be a well-known incendiary, thermate - a "mixture of
thermite and sulfur . . . which lowers the melting point of iron it contacts
when reacting by forming a eutectic system," which is "useful in cutting
through steel.")[18]

Evidence in Plain Sight

Therefore, clear evidence against the official account of Building 7,
according to which it was brought down by fire, existed in plain sight in
the form of videos of its collapse, published testimonies about explosions
in the building, and physical evidence reported in the New York Times. The
reasonable inference to draw from this evidence - namely, that the official
account is false - was reinforced by the first official report on this
building's collapse, which was issued in 2002 by FEMA. Besides including as
an appendix the paper by the WPI professors containing the study of the
Swiss-cheese piece of steel recovered from WTC 7 - a study that attributed
the erosion to "oxidation and sulfidation" while adding: "No clear
explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified"[19] - the
engineers who wrote the FEMA report admitted that their "best hypothesis"
about why WTC 7 collapsed had "only a low probability of occurrence."[20]

Failure to Become Well Known
In addition to all these facts, WTC 7 was a very big building, being 47
stories high and having a base about the size of a football field. Although
it was dwarfed by the 110-story Twin Towers, it would have been the tallest
building in half of the states in the nation. For all of these reasons, the
collapse of this building should have become one of the best-known facts
about 9/11. But it did not.

2. Widespread Ignorance about WTC 7

A Zogby poll in May 2006 found that 43 percent of the American people were
unaware that WTC 7 had collapsed,[21] and that same year, as mentioned
earlier, Danny Jowenko of the Netherlands still did not know about it, even
though controlled demolition was his field.

A dramatic example of the fact that this building's collapse has not been
prominent in the public consciousness was provided in a New York City
courtroom in September 2009. Judge Edward Lehner was hearing arguments about
a petition sponsored by NYC CAN to allow residents to vote on whether New
York City should have its own investigation of the World Trade Center
attacks. After Judge Lehner had observed that the 9/11 Commission had
carried out an investigation and issued a report, Dennis McMahon, a lawyer
for NYC CAN, said that this report left many unanswered questions. "One of
the biggest questions," he added, "is why did Building 7 come down" - at
which point Judge Lehner asked: "Building what?" McMahon replied: "World
Trade Center Seven. There were three buildings that came down." When the
judge, continuing to illustrate his ignorance about this building, asked if
it was owned by the Port Authority, McMahon replied that it was owned by
Larry Silverstein.[22]

Judge Lehner, it should be emphasized, was not simply an ordinary American
citizen. Besides being a judge presiding in New York City, he had been
assigned to a case involving the 9/11 attacks in this city. So his ignorance
about this building was surprising. And yet it was typical. With his query -
"Building what?" - he expressed the ignorance manifested in 2006 by
controlled demolition expert Danny Jowenko and almost half of the American
people. How can we account for this ignorance? . . .